A fashion show or a live performance may last only a few minutes, but what happens within the room is far harder to capture. For Dutch spatial designer Dennis Vanderbroeck, this temporary collectiveness sits precisely at the core of his interdisciplinary practice, which fluidly moves between fashion, theater, music, and performance art. Approaching architecture not merely as a physical shell but as a dynamic framework for human encounter, Vanderbroeck views his environments as tools designed to shape how people interact with one another and experience a shared moment in time.
With a deep professional background rooted in theater, Vanderbroeck focuses intensely on the atmosphere and emotional resonance that a physical setting creates. His designs establish the parameters for encounters between performers and audiences, always leaving room for the unpredictable friction that occurs when bodies occupy a shared space. “I always say that our designs are just a tool to facilitate the experience,” he explains. “It’s more about the experience of the moment than the space itself.”
This philosophy was vividly demonstrated during recent iterations of Milan and Paris fashion weeks, where the designer developed two radically distinct approaches to staging contemporary fashion. From a rigid, scaffolded runway that emphasized raw collective energy for Diesel to a modular arrangement that suggested ongoing movement and contextual change for Miu Miu, Vanderbroeck continues to challenge traditional notions of the runway.
The Space Between the Collective and the Individual
Vanderbroeck’s recent high-profile collaborations with Diesel and Miu Miu reveal two diverging yet complementary ways of exploring the intricate relationship between the group and the individual. His ongoing work with creative director Glenn Martens at Diesel evolved over several seasons, driven by a shared ambition to make fashion presentations more inclusive, approachable, and socially charged. Their final collaborative project for the brand synthesized these ideas through an imposing, rigid scaffolding structure. This performative setting was shaped by community, physical presence, and spatial disruption, where the visual and social contrast between the crowd and the individual became the focal point of the event. While crowds of spectators occupied the massive industrial scaffolding, live performers intermittently disrupted the scene and models navigated the complex pathways below.
In stark contrast, for the Miu Miu Spring/Summer 2027 show at the historic Palais d’Iéna in Paris, Vanderbroeck approached the runway through an exercise in radical proximity. Working with the luxury brand for the first time, the designer and his team crafted an environment featuring tightly arranged bleachers and an unusually narrow catwalk. This intimate layout consciously recalled the palpable tension and closeness of 1990s runway shows, placing the audience shoulder-to-shoulder while models passed by at arm’s length.
Although these two projects stemmed from entirely different conceptual conversations, both examined the dynamic tension between the singular observer and the collective body. “In our fashion work, we always try to do something with this idea of the collective versus the singular, the individual,” he highlights. “That friction is forever interesting to me.” At any standard fashion show, all eyes naturally gravitate toward the garments moving down the runway, but the actual quality of the experience is deeply influenced by the collective crowd surrounding the observer. Vanderbroeck deliberately plays with this underlying dynamic through precise spatial layouts, pulling the audience directly into the heart of the event without prescribing how they should react or feel.
Designing Movement Within a Static Space
The concept of a spatial framework that anticipates its own future use also heavily influenced Vanderbroeck’s debut collaboration with Miu Miu. The physical show environment was developed in direct relation to Geste de Consolation (Gesture of Consolation), an upcoming exhibition by acclaimed French filmmaker Alice Diop, presented as part of the Art Basel Paris Public Program. “We wanted to create a space that suggests movement and that suggests transition,” the spatial designer explains. “So for the exhibition, the same venue will be repurposed almost, reframed, and recontextualized.”
To achieve this, metal tracks laid directly across the historic floor supported modular bleachers, lending the runway an intrinsic sense of kinetic energy even while the main structure remained stationary. The entire arrangement was consciously designed to anticipate the multidisciplinary exhibition that would follow, ensuring that elements of the fashion show could be easily reconfigured and imbued with entirely different meanings within a new context.
Vanderbroeck describes this methodology as building a dynamic stage. Drawing heavily on his foundational training in theater, he treats a set not as a static, finished backdrop, but as an adaptable mechanism capable of accommodating multiple shifting situations over time. The design becomes part of an extended chronological sequence, shaped just as much by what comes next as by the primary event taking place in the room.
From the Theater to the Live Stage
Theater remains a vital point of reference in Vanderbroeck’s practice, informing his spatial interventions across various forms of live performance. For Issey Miyake’s OPEN STUDIO presentation at the Tate Modern, he drew inspiration from the stark, circular geometry of the museum’s subterranean concrete tanks to explore themes of intimacy and the metaphor of an embrace. By utilizing the existing architectural curves, he orchestrated varying degrees of physical and psychological proximity between the performers and the audience members. The experience was carefully choreographed to transition from a broad, collective sense of an embrace down to intimate, one-to-one interactions between a performer and an individual spectator.
Vanderbroeck also carefully considered the audience’s physical journey through the broader museum landscape, moving organically from Henri Matisse’s The Snail through the cavernous Turbine Hall and down into the South Tank. The resulting installation functioned as an interconnected sequence of spatial encounters, where the surrounding architecture and historical artworks directly informed the conceptual core of the performance.
This enduring fascination with how a built setting shapes a live experience extends naturally into the realm of large-scale music tours. For Rosalía’s Lux Tour, Vanderbroeck collaborated closely with the artist and her creative team to weave together disparate visual references spanning fashion, popular culture, theater, and fine art. He views the project as a comprehensive accumulation of his entire artistic practice. “With Rosalía, honestly, it was an accumulation of my whole practice in one project, where fashion, music, but also popular culture and theater and the references through fine art all came together,” Dennis Vanderbroeck notes.
Beyond the Image
In an era defined by the digital dissemination of live events, where spectacles are instantly documented, uploaded, and circulated across social media platforms, Dennis Vanderbroeck remains steadfastly focused on the authentic value of in-person experience. While he acknowledges that striking imagery matters deeply—particularly within the image-driven ecosystem of fashion—he never initiates a design process by imagining how a set will appear through the small screen of a mobile phone.
“I’m always trying to intentionally design from the physical experience,” he shares. “If it then resonates well online or resonates well on your phone or something, then perfect. But it’s never the main intention.” This philosophy directly governed the camera direction and spatial staging for Rosalía’s tour, where cinematic framing was designed to follow the raw, spontaneous energy of the live performance rather than dictate it. For Vanderbroeck, capturing an event on film is merely a tool for memory-making, one that can never truly replicate the visceral impact of spatial presence.
The designer also recognizes the modern compulsion to photograph live events as an urgent psychological attempt to secure a fleeting memory. Pulling out a smartphone often functions as a mechanism to confirm one’s own physical presence, to hold onto an ephemeral experience that would otherwise vanish into history. Yet, a photograph remains fundamentally detached from the living event, which relies entirely on a unique convergence of real bodies, spatial arrangements, movement, and time.
That inherent unpredictability is precisely what continues to draw Vanderbroeck back to the traditional theater. Having recently designed the set for Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, he recalls the nervous tension of the first preview performance in front of a live audience as a reminder that, despite months of rigorous preparation, human reaction remains impossible to script. “You never can predict how an audience is going to respond,” he says. For the spatial designer, that initial, unfiltered encounter between a creative work and its spectators underscores the ultimate limit of architecture: a designer can carefully sculpt the setting and establish the optimal conditions for an experience, but what unfolds once the doors open and people fill the room remains wonderfully beyond human control.
